At Starbucks, the chairs are coming back. Can it become a ‘third place’ again?

Starbucks has meant many things to many people: A convenient caffeine pit stop on the way to work, a place to gather with friends, a cozy nook for writers and creatives. But in recent years, the stores have seemed rather void — of meaning, perhaps, but definitely of furniture. And customers took note. In January, one TikTok user posted that her local Starbucks in San Francisco had been renovated and had half as much seating as it used to. “Another third place gone to the wind of maximizing the ability to get out as many mobile pick-up orders as possible,” the user wrote.

They’re not wrong. It’s all part of Starbucks’s evolution from lone coffee bean seller to beloved cafe to global convenience chain. Now the brand is trying to adapt after complaints from customers — and even its own founder — that it had abandoned its homey vibe. Here’s how the coffee giant’s look has changed over the years, and what it says about our shifting social landscape.

How it all began

The first-ever Starbucks wasn’t a cafe at all. Its initial Seattle location, opened in 1971, sold whole coffee beans before moving to its storefront in the city’s iconic Pike Place Market. Starbucks’s identity as a cafe began with the return of its marketing director, Howard Schultz. He left the company to launch his own coffee shop, but returned with a new mythos for Starbucks — one allegedly inspired by a trip to Italy, where much of social and civic life centered around cafes. Long conversations took place over cortados and cappuccinos, making cafes “third places,” or somewhere to socialize outside of life’s main locations for connection: home and the workplace. In 1987, Schultz bought out Starbucks, merged it with his former Il Giornale cafe, and the coffee giant was born.

Though the term “third place” became synonymous with the coffee house — and, more specifically, Starbucks — Schultz didn’t coin it. The third place was a central concept to sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book, The Great Good Place. “Schultz claims to have had this epiphany when he went to Milan,” Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University and author of the book Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, tells Yahoo Life. “Whatever Schultz really thought, he perceived something really smart: People were suburbanizing [and] there was a fear and mistrust of people, but people also missed connection.”

Building community — and a brand

Starbucks, Schultz decided, would be the locus for a sense of community that Americans were missing. “He laid out the stores in a way that at least invited people to sit down and slow down,” says Simon. At least, it would look like such a place. Starbucks initially added chairs, stools and tables, covering the basics of furnishing a hang-out space. But Schultz wanted the stores to look welcoming and more upscale than, say, McDonald’s. Starbucks stores were intended to “look like spaces for anyone to go, but they weren’t for just anyone: They were elevated places to go,” Simon says.

Schultz’s vision of Starbucks made it not just a place to buy a product, but an experience worth paying for, B. Joseph Pine II, a management adviser and author who coined the term “experience economy,” tells Yahoo Life. That sense of doing something special makes us more willing to pay a higher price for something as simple as a cup of coffee, say both Pine and Simon.

Comfy chairs, awkward tables

If you want to make a space look like a place where you could sit down, add some chairs. If you want to make it look like you could stay awhile, add comfortable chairs. That was more or less the approach that Starbucks took, beginning in 1996. According to the company, that’s when it swapped out some of its hard seating options in favor of furnishings that felt more homey, as symbolized by the big, plush, purple velvet armchairs it placed in many of its stores. Simon remembers one in downtown Philadelphia, near where he lives, that featured the purple chair prominently displayed in its front window. “It was a staged promise that you could stop there,” he says. But Simon also believes that “Starbucks was never actually interested in community.” He points out that during the same era when the purple chairs graced the stores, they also featured large round tables he considers “designed deliberately to be hard to sit at.”

Simon doesn’t think that design choices like those tables were an attempt to keep people apart, though. Instead, he believes that Starbucks recognized that most Americans wanted the store to look like a place to meet new people, but, in reality, they mostly wanted to be “alone at a table in public,” he says. Americans weren’t happy being spread out and disconnected from one another in suburbia, “but they didn’t necessarily want to talk to strangers and be involved in the hard conversations with strangers that third spaces are really about,” Simon adds.

Where did all the seats go?

The velvet chairs of the late ’90s and early aughts were meant to look lived-in, and they got lived in. The plush fabric didn’t hold up very well against the heavy traffic; by the early 2000s, Starbucks cafes and their furniture looked a bit tired, and customers had begun “rejecting the sameness” of the global chain, says Simon. “This is probably inevitable when you sell culture, because culture is ephemeral and it’s hard to hold onto that forever.”

And then 2008 happened. Amid the global economic recession, coffee sales plummeted as people looked to cut back on their spending. Starbucks was forced to close 600 of its stores and Schultz stepped in to refocus on customers. Starbucks polled its coffee drinkers and integrated their critiques into its strategy, but the real driver of its rebound was technology. Mobile apps allowed customers to order their favorite frappuccinos with ease and made Starbucks a stronger competitor against cheaper options like McDonald’s.

More than a decade later, mobile ordering helped Starbucks survive and thrive during the pandemic. Social-media-friendly drinks like purple lavender lattes, bright green matcha iced beverages and, of course, holiday favorites like the pumpkin spice latte earned Starbucks additional loyalty.

Sugary, sometimes neon-colored refreshers made Starbucks a popular hangout for teenagers who continue to flock to the cafes, while adult customers have been less enthused. But the company also did things that made its cafes exceedingly popular places to go. (And go: Starbucks’s single-stall, free-to-use bathrooms had been such a welcome amenity in the early 2000s that Michael Bloomberg, then mayor of New York City, said the metropolis didn’t need public restrooms because “there’s enough Starbucks that’ll let you use the bathroom.”)

Amid a rise in homelessness in the 2020s, many customers noticed that chairs were disappearing or being replaced by hard, uncomfortable seating. Pine and Simon believe this was intended to discourage people from hanging out in the cafes and using their bathrooms without buying anything, and Starbucks itself cited safety concerns. In Simon’s hometown of Philadelphia, the purple chair in the downtown Starbucks window was replaced “by a bunch of boxes,” he says. And this year, the company announced the end of its open-door bathroom policy, instead requiring that people make a purchase in order to receive bathroom access or water.

The chairs are coming back

Some customers have been puzzled and disappointed by the changes. Even its founder and former CEO, Schultz, was unhappy, posting an open letter to Starbucks on LinkedIn and calling for it to return to form. In Pine’s opinion, Starbucks had sacrificed its most valuable asset: experience. He even penned an op-ed in the Harvard Business Review, titled “How Starbucks devalued its own brand.” He blames not only the lack of seating, but the abandonment of personal touches, such as ditching handwritten names on cups in favor of printed labels. During the pandemic and after, “you could still buy all the Starbucks goods with mobile ordering and contactless delivery, but it was the experience of anyplace where you got together with people that we really missed,” Pine says.

In January, within weeks of Pine’s HBR article being published (and less than a month after the bathroom policy change), Starbucks announced an about-face: The chairs and condiment bars are coming back, and the brand is introducing ceramic mugs and glasses for free refills of some drinks. “I’m happy to say the third place is alive and well. It’s as needed as it ever was,” CEO Brian Niccol said at the Starbucks shareholder meeting in March. “We’re working hard to ensure our coffeehouses have the right vibe. We want to invite customers in, showcase our great coffee, provide a comfortable place to stay and make them feel like their visit was time well spent.”

To create the right “vibe,” Starbucks is revamping its cafe interiors. The company told Yahoo Life that it’s testing its new look in a few locations. In lieu of photos of those cafes, Starbucks shared renderings it says are indicative of the future of its locations, which feature cushioned seating, wood-paneled service areas and a lounge-y feel. Pine says that the new look is “very much in line” with what he hoped to see.

But it’s not just about the furniture. If Starbucks is to be the “third place” it claims to be, its focus needs to be on how people connect within its stores, not simply where they sit. Pine is happy that the company is bringing back handwriting on some coffee cups because that “makes things more personal. That’s where the rubber meets the road,” he says. “It’s the interaction that people have in the place, not just with their friends or strangers, but with the baristas, that can make or break that visit.”